Sunday, October 18, 2015

The Power Behind Magic

How do your games handle magic and where magical power comes from? My world Fletnern, and I guess in the game Legend Quest though probably more as an optional rule, has different magics coming from different sources. Honestly the rule book sort of glosses over it, and the Book of Wishes (the magic expansion) doesn’t get into it too deeply. That’s because LQ has always been focused on letting you run your game world how you want and tries not to force game world/setting issues into the rules.

Enough dancing around the issue - What do we mean? Necromancy is controlled by the magic involved in death. Healing is involved in the magic of life. Sorcery draws on the magic created from change or if you need to say it chaos. Druid = nature; illusion = light and darkness; spell singing = emotions; and conjuring draws magic from somewhere else, not natural to this world. But I like when things overlap. Druidic magic draws on nature, but that means that it is drawing some of its magic from the elemental magics that fuel the elementalists. Herbalists draw power from nature too, but pretty specifically only the plant side of nature. Spiritualism draws magic from death, but also from one of the “dimensions” that conjuring uses (the spirit realm). So necromancy and spiritualism may have some of the same spells and actually be able to use the same talismans to enhance their spells, but not always because they are not twins, but kissing cousins.

Nothing is more boring during a game session than a GM trying to explain the technical points of magic to the players. That’s not why they came. They’re looking to be challenged in some way (most often combat), but not lectured to. So by no means am I suggesting you spend game time having some scribe explain how magic works. You can have discussions with your players about it when you’re sitting around doing nothing, like when you’re waiting for others to show up, even if it’s waiting for the other guys to show up on your way to a “night out on the town” not necessarily a game. I strongly discourage you from discussing it at the bar! That never goes well.

But why do you care? First off, knowing more about how your world works makes missions and adventures pop into your mind. If you are thinking about using certain kinds of magic in combination, you will start thinking about how the bad guys are going to try and funnel sorcery through a conjured creature and try to take over the tri-state area. If you don’t know how magic works, then you will never create your own spells and be stuck with the stuff in the books. Your own stuff is usually much cooler!

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Board Enterprises has been in business since 1991. We are a small press game publisher. Our flagship product is Legend Quest, but we have also taken a strong direction into generic supplements for all fantasy role-playing games.